Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
It’s important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.
They point wasn’t to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody’s happy with the situation, but it’s the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.
I also don’t think it’s wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
That’s true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.
This isn’t reddit 2.0. It’s a different platform with different mechanics that hasn’t had over a decade to mature.
Change is hard. People need to learn to adapt.
Right, but even non-reddit users would be confused by it. When everyone advertises lemmy as seamlessly integrating with all the different instances, it doesn’t matter what instance your account is on, this definitely is not that.
It’s a young platform experiencing unprecedented growth. There’s going to be growing pains where misunderstandings and misinformation are bound to happen. We need to correct the misinformation and set proper expectations.
The ability for a server admin to choose what servers they federate with is a core concept of the fediverse and needs to be properly communicated.
The idea behind federation is, that individuals host their own instance and connect (federate) with others individual’s instances.
But that’s not easy for less tech savvy people.
Expectation management… people need to stop pitching this on Reddit as the new Reddit then.
But… It is essentially identical in design to Reddit apart from the decentralised concept.
Which is a massive change that tbh I’m still not sold on.
Federation seems to cause more problems than it solves and it’s created so many fractured communities that it’s impossible to get involved in niche ones anymore.
I foresee a lot of issues with defederation and the proposed mod tools in the future, as well. They can refederate but it’s not a good look for the platform when the federation can be fractured so easily. We have not seen the last of this issue.
I also question what it’s going to look like when these moderation tools are implemented. Lemmy has more avenues for moderation/admin abuse than Reddit, and less recourse for users. There are a lot of concerns here that just seem to be swept under the rug under the pretence that “you can always go to another instance”.
Ultimately it’s not an issue with the function of the fediverse, but with the moderation philosophy of the people running these instances. Particularly when it comes to the viability of voting. That’s a huge opportunity for suppression that I don’t trust certain admins not to abuse.
How does Lemmy have more avenues for admin abuse than Reddit? On either platform, the admins can technically do whatever they want. (Including editing users posts, spez). Lemmy makes it easier to just go somewhere else. At the end of the day that is all you can do.
The` point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that``
They are making community policy around a single person?
I am not following.
With that being said, they can do as they please and other can do what they want. That’s the beautity of the protocol.
However, people shoudnt be surpised when others take the ball and play else where.
Looking forward to seeing how this works out.
That was just a typo. Beehaw has advertised itself as being a largely positive, safe online space. People who sign up for it would generally be considered to want that same ethos.
It’s not ideal at the moment but until the moderation tools improve it’s the best way forward if they want to stick to their ethos. I enjoy Beehaw and the admin do seem like they want to refererate when it’s possible to.
I’m on both Beehaw and Lemmy.world so I between the two I can interact with everything I would want to see.
Newbie here. Is there an easy way to identify a beehaw community? I’ve been hitting the subscribe button left and right to build up my profile feed and I’m just winging it here. thanx!
The community name will end in “@beehaw”.
If you go to the community search bar and search for say, “gaming” you’ll get multiple results. The one that’s just “gaming” is your home instance, any with an “@instancename” behind them are from elsewhere.
okay, that makes it easy. Thanx for replying!
If you are using an app remember to turn on the option to see instance names right next to the poster’s username.
Also their icons are pretty recognizable, I think they are all yellow honeycombs.
And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.
There are already conversations about Nomadic Identities and what that would look like. Until that is done, I agree with you that there are going to be some issues, such as this. The fact that this is on their radar is very promising.
set up shop on an instance
Don’t do that. You probably should have multiple accounts on different instances. If you really need a continuous, single identity, post links to all your usernames in each.
This is why the move from Reddit was so difficult for Redditors: because we put all our eggs into Reddit Inc’s basket. All our content is under Reddit’s control. This analysis can be applied to any centralized social media service. If your instance shits the bed or bans itself from everyone else, you can move somewhere else. You can start your own in the worst case. It’s annoying, but at least there is a real path to move on.
We shouldn’t be putting our eggs in any one basket. We shouldn’t have been doing it before the Fediverse, and we shouldn’t be doing it here either. Your social media access should not be dependent on the goodwill of one person or entity. Eventually, that entity will corrupt.
Also, I’m on vlemmy.net. Right now, they haven’t defederated from anyone, and I believe we’re still not banned from Beehaw or anyone else. If you really want the whole Fediverse (and you probably don’t), make an account on vlemmy or one of the top three instances on this page.
Why don’t you have a second account?
Lazy. Don’t care if my shit gets fucked. But if you do care if your shit gets fucked, then you shouldn’t rely on centralized social media.
this is why i plan to host my own federated instance - no pissing matches can be had, and i can federate with any larger ones that i like/pick up steam.
I’m genuinely curious of a real answer on this as I have the same concerns having registered on InfoSec.pub. Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community? What happens to my account if they shutter? It’s not like I can login using Lemmy.ca as my community.
As cool as this is, it’s not fully thought through IMHO. There’s a reason centralization tends to occur naturally. We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances? I’m lazy I’ll get around to digging more eventually but right now this is a curiousity.
Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community?
There is a feature request to allow accounts to be transferred to other instances. So that’s in the works.
We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances?
Someone that’s not spez.
There’s no such thing as a perfect system that shitty people can’t fuck up in some way. All that can be done is to mitigate the damage on shitty person can do. So yeah, if the instance you’re on gets taken over by assholes, it’s going to be a problem. But it will be less of a problem if you’re on a centralized system that gets taken over by an asshole.
Case in point: beehaw is an instance that hosts a lot of LGBTQ communities. The influx of new users comes with an influx of new assholes. The kind of assholes that say shitty things to people in the LGBTQ+ community. On a centralized system they’d either have to accept those slurs or move to some other centralized system. But on lemmy, they have the option of temporarily disconnecting from the instances that have had an influx of assholes.
It’s a growing pains kind of thing really.Most of the new users aren’t assholes, and some of the new users will step up and become mods and the assholes will be removed. But until then, some smaller instances are going to batten down the hatches until the storm passes.
Lemmy offers options like this that a centralized system doesn’t have. Does having additional options make a system worse?
What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.
You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in
I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just
Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further
What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.
You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in
I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just
Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further q
This argument is absurd. What happens, right now, if Reddit shuts down? Where can you take your account to access what’s on Reddit?
The fact is federations CAN be set up this way. Lemmy is new and the people providing the service are working to get things functional as fast as possible. Federating authentication is possible. Can you do it right this second? Nope.
Can you do it with Reddit right this second?
“I’m not gonna do this because it doesn’t work the way I think it should.” News flash, Reddit doesn’t work that way either, while you’re not doing it on Reddit…. Lemmy CAN work that way, Reddit… yah good luck.
I get it, mediocrity now is better than improvements later…
I think the logic is more that reddit is not going to close up shop anytime soon. Whereas Dave running a server from his basement genuinely might just shut down any moment. Just because both instances are possible, doesn’t mean they’re equally likely.
Right up until Twitter shut everything off unless you were logged in and throttled you if you are logged in I’d have agreed with you… YouTube is preventing you from watching YouTube if they decide they can’t advertise at you… The point is, big social media has come up with creative ways to make using their service miserable if not impossible. Even reddit is doing it right? I find your assessment of possible versus likely incomplete at best.
What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.
You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in
I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just
Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further
I mean, I was on Beehaw when this happened so had to move my account. It took ten minutes to manually copy over all my subscriptions (and I believe there are automated ways to do that now). Hardly the end of the world 🤷♀️
And it’s extra shitty because Beehaw has the largest technology community in the fediverse, so if you want to access it you better make sure you’re a member of one of their ‘blessed’ federated friends.
largest tech community in the fediverse
TIL. I assumed between lemmy.world, programming.dev, infosec.pub I’d had my tech feed basically covered
This splintering of communities can be a drawback, but it can also be a blessing. Instead of having one account where I do all my social media things, I’ve been categorizing the types of social media I enjoy and creating an account for each category, on the instance that feels closest to that type of media. It’s kind of nice because I know exactly what kind of content subscriptions I’m going to see when I switch to each account. It’s also nice to be able to comment on things and know that people who look at my history will see comments on similar topics. Someone’s opinion on my comments about politics, for example, won’t be colored by my recent comments about extraterrestrials in a different community.
There is some risk of being part of a community that might disappear someday, or become something you don’t like, but that’s a risk present in all social media. As another commenter mentioned, the advantage here is that you can set up your own instance where you can control your own data. It’s actually going to be beneficial that a lot of people do this, so that the fediverse as a whole can handle everyone’s traffic without operation costs ballooning beyond control for any individual instance.
But a consequence of this is the creation of many small communities about the same topics, spread across many instances. I think we will need to create some method of federating many communities across many instances in a categorical way. For example, if I want to see all communities about cooking across all instances, there would need to be some decentralized method of tagging communities by topic. That way you don’t have to decide which community is most representative of what you want to see. And there could be many tags for each community, so if I want to see only videos about only cooking, where only vegan food is shown, there may be a community that ranks high in all those tags.
Instead of subscribing to the community itself, you would just subscribe to the tag, creating a virtual subscription to all the contained communities. You’d be able to see all the communities for your selected topic(s) across the whole lemmyverse. And if you see a community that you think does not belong to something that it’s been tagged with, you can unsubscribe it from the tag so it doesn’t show in that list for you. If more people do the same, that community would fall in ranking on that tag list until eventually it is taken off. But if people upvote content from that community more than communities higher in the ranking, that community would rise in the tag list.
I’m not sure if others would be interested in a system like this, but in my mind, it is the kind of thing we need to have rich curated content at low cost. Okay, I’m done now.
I don’t really like this approach because it’s not personally customizable and wouldn’t be very straightforward. I’d prefer something similar to multireddits where I can make a collection of similar communities.
With the platform at the size that it is currently, I’m inclined to agree with you. But I think in the future, lemmy may become large enough that having a public tagging system would be useful.
Ideally, the two preferences can coexist. The multireddit equivalent would just be a private tag, exclusive to your account. But you could make it public, either anonymously or posted to your account, e.g. tag@pyrojoe@lemmy.world.
Then, all the public tags can be merged at will, so if I make a new account and want to see all communities about birds, I can select the bird tag. If I want to make edits to the tag list without affecting the public tag, I would even have the ability to copy the public tag to my own private tag and prune the communities I don’t like without decreasing their public rankings.
I think this would provide flexible levels of functionality to those who want it, but there may also be hidden consequences of this method that I’m currently missing.
I think it has positives. and the negatives can be adressed with new features like a federated identity . something that could allow you to keep accounts on multiple servers combining subscriptions deduping content and letting you control what user to use to interact.
No. This is just a problem that hasn’t been solved yet! It will be in time haha.
Head back to Reddit the way you came then, friend.
No, discussion is welcome here. Even mine, even yours.
@SteelBeard@lemmy.world , you should add a link to the announcement which explains why Beehaw defederated since this looks to be the top question many are asking.
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Mod work in general is going to be a tough issue for everyone to solve. Different places will have different norms they want to enforce, and a limited volunteer staff to push that agenda. But there’s nothing that can’t be automated. Automate the creation of AI mods, automate the selection of user mods, automate the banning of objectionable comments and users using a combination of both humans and AI to both handle the workload and adhere to community regulations. If these tools can be developed as part of lemmy, automated moderation can become an available option for all instances, which hopefully will mean that moderation here will be better quality and lower cost than moderation on that other social media site, I’m forgetting the name.
tldr; too hard to mod. That’s pretty dumb, but the cool thing with the fedi is you can just not care and swap instances.
Those are good points. Time to find a different instance. My account is not precious. Supporting a sustainable growth is.
The slowness of Lemmy.world to defederate from the fascists, and now this makes me feel I can find a better home. A home that is a better partner to the fediverse.
I will be curious to learn what works best for you.
Probably a smaller server. I need to do some more research. Lemmy.world one of the highlighted big servers when I joined during one of the waves from Reddit. I am sure there are plenty better smaller /mid-size server LD, I could join instead.
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You may find that we really like safe spaces on Lemmy.
I like safe time, but that’s much harder to come by.
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It’s getting pretty tiring to see people feeling entitled to have access to any and all communities of the Fediverse, if the people paying for the running cost of the Beehaw instance wants to defederate (for whatever reason, “good” or “bad”), that’s their prerogative.
If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.
One of the great things about the Fediverse in general is choice, user and instance admin can choose how they want to interact, and are not beholden to a company or group which can take any arbitrary decisions they want.
TLDR : Instance admin are entitled to how they want to run it, you’re not.
I’m entitled to leave to another instance. One of the main things to look at when choosing an instance is who they are federated/defederated with. I would never join BeeHaw Lemmy.world, or Sh.itjust.works because of their feud. I’d rather join a third party instance and have access to all the content on all three.
It’s not a feud, lol. Admins from all of them say they talked it out and they plan to re-federate in the future. Beehaw wants to be a heavily moderated instance, and lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were growing faster than Beehaw’s moderation ability.
If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.
I think it was pretty clear, yeah
Until the instance you choose to set up on ends up in a feud with any, or all of those instances.
The whole fediverse experiment is going to end up with a number of small, highly segregated communities, and even more political polarization. I guess if you want to live in an echo chamber, a federated environment is the best way to go about it.
I don’t think so, Lemmy is just going through growing pains. Those instances are already talking about refederating.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
I signed up through sh.itjust.works - was this a bad idea? Only opened my account 2 days ago so learning the ropes.
Don’t worry about it, sh.itjust.works is a popular instance and Beehaw just want to do their own thing. Unless there’s a specific community hosted on Beehaw that you really want to be a part of you probably won’t notice, as most popular subjects have communities on other servers.
Nothing is stopping you to register on multiple and see how each one feels, then stick to the one you like most. Instances with application process tend to have a bit more curated user bases and that’s reflected in conversations where they participate. You could try lemmy.world, Beehaw, lemmy.ml, or any other instance.
Shitjustworks was defederated from Beehaw, if you absolutely want to be able to post on Beehaw, you’ll have to create an account there, otherwise you should have access to every other instances federated to shitjustworks
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
I’m criticizing people criticizing people for criticizing people who criticize people who criticize…
You’re just as tiring as the people you’re criticizing.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Wow so much misinformed hostility against Beehaw here. The mod tools for Lemmy are currently limited and they just want to protect their community from trolls and spam. There’s no conspiracy here to break federation.
Beehaw is some pseudo moral purity echo chamber. They consider anyone with a contrary opinion a troll. People create these “safe spaces” under the guise of protecting minority groups, but fuck… I’m a minority, and I knew immediately I wasn’t going to be welcome there.
People are free to judge it as they please.
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Why aren’t other instances having this problem? Like if trolls and spam are such an issue, why do I only see relevant on topic comments in other instances?
The issue isn’t trolls, it’s political dissent. And if you care about the truth, if you care about having the ability to talk about and express your ideas freely to other people, to have uncomfortable discussions with people you disagree with, to be exposed to new ideas, and fuck… to possibly even change your mind, you shouldn’t support beehaw.
If you genuinely want that type of environment, go for it, but that place should be called out for what it is.
This type of political authoritianism is why I left Reddit. It kills discussion, and I’m here for critical discussion.
Beehaw lost me when admins allowed a female user to repeatedly insult men, say 95% of them are awful, that men shouldn’t even exist etc they claim they’re a “safe, welcoming space” but it’s actually hypocritical.
They defederated from this and other instances and yet I’ve never seen any comments reaching that level of hostility here. The only way to interpret that is that they actually are okay with insults and bigotry as long as it suits their whims. If a man had made the same remarks it’d be written off as the rantings of an incel and they’d likely be banned.
I should be their target audience as someone who has voted left my entire life and it’s too much and too controlled for me. Either they’re for all equality and inclusiveness or they’re not. Pick one.
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Why would you not be welcome? Is it for your political opinions? Even if it were, I don’t think they would personally shun you unless it entails attacking minorities.
That aside, and having said that of course it is everyone’s perrogative to judge this behavior, I personally feel it is an exaggeration. Not every instance is about free speech nor should they be, at the end of the day the fediverse is about creating communities, one is able and should shape them into what their vision of that is. This is not authoritarianism, in this case they said it is due to their inability to moderate.
Even if it weren’t for that, it is good that communities don’t federate with every instance, aa I said, not everyone is about free speech and changing opinions some are here to have a good time and for that adequate protection is necessary.
I myself prefer deciding myself when to block other instances, so I joined one that let’s users decide. But if other instances decided to block us I would understand and either move on or join another instance to interact with them without thinking much about it (having multiple accounts is kind of easy on the apps,)
I think I’m kind of used from servers blocking one another from my time on mastodon and I’ve seen the necessity of the practice, for example an anime focused group blocking bot instances, brigading, alt right groups, etc.
This is not authoritarianism, in this case they said it is due to their inability to moderate.
Rationally I think this is straight bullshit. Their inability to moderate is because of the desire to control the political direction of topics. If people want an echo chamber, fine, but I’m calling it out.
If people want an echo chamber, fine, but I’m calling it out.
Yes, that was always allowed. Beehaw is extremely up front about the kinds of voices and perspectives welcome on it. It never claimed to be a bastion of free speech. Complaining about that is like saying you don’t like a burger restaurant because they don’t serve sushi.
Dude this is a discussion based website, and you’re complaining about me complaining? Pot meet kettle.
you’re complaining about me complaining?
I think it was Alexander Pope who once said that bad criticism does more harm than bad writing. Same principle applies here. Your criticism is bad. You don’t like getting “called out on it,” then make a better one.
Dude I’m voicing my opinion. You apparently don’t even disagree you just dislike like I’m expressing it? What’s your deal?
Fine, I just don’t get the echo chamber feeling but admittedly I only use beehive for gaming/anime/escapism hobby related communities so I haven’t seen it being all about conteolling politics, at least not directly.
At the end of the day I barely get what you mean by controlling politics, since it is not apparent on the communities I visit. Also keep in mind, I’m not american so if this is about the culture war over there or a republicans vs democrats thing I probably won’t notice it since it hasn’t affected any discussion I’ve had.
But I would need concrete examples for me to see it as authoritarian because in a vacuum as I explained I can see communities pulling this kind of conduct without it being about controlling the discourse per se but more about helping communities.
Edit: forgot to say, but if it was over politics I don’t think that would necessitate a ban lemmy.world (or alternative ly that would mean complete defederation) since it has no clear political affiliation, I see it just it being massive and difficult to moderate otherwise they would have targeted many other toxic instances way before touching .world.
So if you take Reveddit, and go look at Reddit communities you’ll see massive political disparity in how comments are moderated. Go look at beehaw modlogs and you’ll see the same thing.
If you personally aren’t able to see the bias in moderating, sorry I don’t know how to teach that.
Eh, there were a few posts about this on lemmy.world when it happened. People went through beehaw’s modlog and could only find a handful of actions taken against both communities.
Seems they just want to have their own little bubble.
Safe spaces are pretty much that. I would actually like to join beehaw if I ever need to switch to an instance for my own sanity. I left reddit but it’s followed us here so I think a more curated experience would be nice.
That is unless they’re nazis, fascists, authoritarian or any other kind of violent extremist faction. I’m sick of having no faith in humanity because of all these backwards ideologies being “expressed”. To quote Costanza, these pretzels are making me thirsty.
I also don’t like how beehaw has downvotes disabled. I get not wanting there to be brigading, or negativity, but being able to downvote a troll, or a post that is blatantly providing misinformation (purposefully or not), is invaluable.
I think there’s value in it. The underlying idea is that if someone is wrong, even if blatantly so, you have to take the effort to explain why. On reddit, the downvote button was just as often used as a community cudgel against dissenting opinion, even when the opinion was 1) genuinely harmless but unpopular, 2) well reasoned and supported by evidence but something that went against the mob mentality, or 3) just something that people didn’t understand and their gut reaction to it was negative.
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Yep, I applied to join when I was fresh and it asks about how active applicants are. I was honest and said I wasn’t the most active person but that I did participate in the subs that I used the most. Was trying to be honest and didn’t see any red flags with that. They still denied me, so fuck beehaw
True, but unsubbed from them when it happened because I don’t want to see communities I can’t interact with.
Why add to the problem and have frustration with wanting to discuss something you are blocked from?
They have every right to protect themselves against spam. But that said, ever since they defederated, their activity and user numbers are down.
Agree that they have every right to handle their instance however they want. I also have the right to not interact with them while they are blocking the instance I call home.
Good. Serves 'em right.
this is completely reasonable, they own the instance and should be able to do whatever they want with it.
OP didn’t say it was wrong. Just a tip.
If you don’t want to color with your opinion, use a different word than shadowban. They didn’t do this with malice as the connotations of that word would imply.
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Defederation is always malicious. Imagine your email getting silently lost, because gmail defederated from aol.
The network has started to implode sooner than I expected. This was an interesting week and a half…
I’m guessing you have no idea that the mods of world and shitjustwork talked with the mods at behaw, and they all agreed it was the right thing to do at the time. You obviously don’t know the situation, or understand that the fediverse is not supposed to work like a centralized platform.
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What fediverse? We’re finding ourselves on an island. Seeing other islands far away, while not being sure if they can hear us or not.
I’m trying to stay positive, but I’m seeing people making the same predictable mistakes over again. To start the fediverse going, we need to do ONE thing. Federate. I knew a bunch of people would appear, and do exactly the oposite, ruining the whole thing for everyone, but I had no idea it would happen even before we got any serious traction.
There are tons of great, mature software projects aimed at smaller, closely moderated communities. PHPBB, SMF, Discourse, various *chan clones… yet, they chose a new, experimental software, who’s only strong feature was the ability to connect communities together. Just to turn it off.
In the last 5 years I’ve tried Twister, Secure Scuttlebut, Mastodon, Matrix, Nostr, even the protocols not using the internet as a physical layer at all, like disaster.radio, Meshtastic, rnode.
I just want a place to gather news and read some shitposts, without the constant bug hunting and drama.
Is there a page where we can see which instances are ban-crazy and which ones actually federate and communicate?
It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but still: https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ (might be slow to load).
This helps, thanks!
That would be awesome
This is a bit of a bummer since I’m interested in a lot of the beehaw communities. Should users just make separate accounts to interact with beehaw communities?
a lot of the beehaw communities have alternatives in the rest of the lemmyverse. while I can participate in beehaw communities, i personally found it more useful to just block all beehaw communities (so I don’t accidentally post there) and participate in the non-beehaw communities so I’m interacting with the majority of the fediverse.
most of the other instances are low-drama and don’t have issues with defederating/shadowbanning like beehaw does!
There’s no reason you can’t have it both ways. Ban behaw here, and join beehaw there, if you feel any fear of missing out.
I think that’s one of the best things about federation. You get to taste both options. If they’re right about high-admission instances leading to lower quality content, the only way to know it is to be in both places. Thankfully, we can.
I’ve tried a couple times to create an account there and been denied.
Yes.
I use a separate account for Beehaw but ever since they defederated I haven’t seen as much activity on there.
Makes sense. The problem with their approach was it basically punished people on Beehaw rather than people on the instances they deem problematic. I see what they’re trying to do and have absolutely no problem with it, but I and most people I’d got to know there just moved to another instance so we could interact outside the walled garden. Whereas my account on .world was unaffected because there’s alternatives to all the Beehaw stuff elsewhere.
Well when they defederated, that’s why I decided to make an account on Lemmy.world too.
Sounds like a double-edged sword. High admittance rate may mean spammier as well as trollier content, but low admissions and blacklisting other instances means people will move their stuff to where they expect more people to see it.
Go to beehaw.org/instances to see what instances are blocked and which allowed. I’m on lemmy.fmhy.ml, which I picked because it was a decent sized instance that was still federated by all the big instances. Fingers crossed it stays that way.
Yeah lemmy.world has a more open sign up which is a double edged sword. It’s good in that it’s easier to set up an account and start talking.
But the other side of it is that it’s also easier for shitty people to sign up. The kind of people that will say shitty things to the LGBTQ+ communities on beehaw.
So yeah, you might want to consider signing up for an account on an instance that’s a little more selective. You’ll probably have to write up a few paragraphs introducing yourself, and it might take a little time for it to be reviewed.
AI is going to mess with that process so fast I’d be surprised if that hasn’t happened already. While it seems unavoidable, still probably a good idea to have the personal question text box for now. But it seems like only a stopgap. We’ll need something better.
But how do you proceduralize moderation? Even though it will raise operation costs, it might be necessary to host our own AI on the back end of each opted-in instance, and provide the tools to train it on content that the admins of that instance find objectionable.
There would be growing pains of course, where some of our comments are held to be reviewed by participating moderators, who are themselves selected by an AI trained on content the admins of the instance find to be exceptional. And it would help to label and share the tensors we mine from this, so a new instance could gain access to a common model and quickly select a few things they don’t want in their instance, even giving them the ability to automatically generate a set of rules based on the options they selected when building the AI for their instance.
It would take some time for all the instances to figure out which groups they do and don’t want to connect with, both in terms of internal users and external instances. I think you’d end up with two distinct clumps of communities that openly communicate within their clump, with a bigger blurrier clump between them, of centrists, with whom most communities communicate. But on either side there would almost certainly be tiny factions clumped together, who don’t communicate with most of the centrist groups, on the basis that they communicate with the other side. And there will always be private groups as well, some of which may choose their privacy on the basis that they refuse to communicate with any group that communicates with the centrist cloud.
And in most of our minds, the two groups in question are probably political, but I think a similar pattern will play out in any sufficiently large network of loosely federated instances, even if the spectrum is what side of a sports rivalry you’re on. If we get to the point where there’s an instance or more in almost every household, we may be able to see these kinds of networks form in realtime.
But the question I can’t seem to answer: Is it good? Or rather, is it good enough?
People always think of what they would do if they had a time machine and could go back and “change things.” But in terms of federated social media, we already are back, almost at the start. So, if we’re going to think of a better way, now would be a good time.
If we start to see a high degree of polarization among the instances of lemmy, what is the right thing to do about that? To all turn our backs, take our content and go home, make sure they have to have accounts on our side to see it, and if they ever make a subversive comment on our side of the fence, it’s removed before a human can ever see it, only spot-checked occasionally to make sure the bot is not being too harsh? Because that is one way of doing it, and maybe it’s the right way. If we train the AI well enough. Which depends on many of us doing that well enough across many instances. Maybe that is how you defeat Nazis, to make sure they can only talk about Nazi things in a boring wasteland of their own design.
But I worry. Once instances are better networked, becoming more about quantity than size, and billionaires are able to set up “instance farms” where AI bots try to influence the rest of the fediverse en masse, will we be ready to head it off? Or similar to how we can’t see the Nazis crawling out from their wasteland to get higher quality memes, will we end up paling around with the bots designed to make our society trend toward slavery while their energy consumption raises the cost of the electricity we have to work for? Of course, if the bots do end up more convincingly human than humans can ever be, who am I to say they don’t deserve a larger cut of our power?
But how do you proceduralize moderation?
You don’t. That’s something you need a person to do.
All the big corporations have been spending ridiculous amounts of money on algorithms to solve these problems and what have they come up with? Does it feel like the algorithms on the corporate social media sites have been working well?
You can’t come up with an algorithm that can solve human interaction. People will just constantly probe any algorithm to discover it’s weaknesses and exploit them. They’ll come up up with systems with code words, stochastic terrorism, implied threats of violence that an algorithm won’t notice but the recipient of the message will understand.
One of the effects of social media has been that it’s convinced everyone that people shouldn’t be trusted. That may be true, but it seems we can’t trust algorithms either. We just have to accept that no system that humans are involved in can ever be perfect. Best we can do is try to identify people that are intelligent, responsible, and exercise good judgment to do the job of moderation. Sure people will make mistakes, but so do algorithms. But unlike algorithms, people are capable of empathy. There are are certainly bad people out there, but there are more good people than bad people. And the bad people will exploit an algorithm more easily than they can manipulate an intelligent person that has good judgement.
Is it good? Or rather, is it good enough?
I think good enough is all that’s possible in any system that involves humans. And social media is going to involve humans, no way around that. But that’s fine isn’t it? It’s good enough.
If we start to see a high degree of polarization among the instances of lemmy, what is the right thing to do about that?
Well everyone has a right to say what they want. But everyone else has the right to ignore people they aren’t interested in listening to. I don’t see things like defederation as a bug, it’s a feature. I think it can be improved, make it clear to the users what’s happening. Maybe there should be an in-between state where instance aren’t completely defederated but the admin can indicate some servers have questionable content the users on their server have to opt in to see.
The key here is to get away from the idea of controlling content and controlling the users. Maximize choice. People choose their server. The admin can choose to ban them. The User can then choose another server (or even set up their own). The users choose the server based on it’s moderation policies and which servers it’s federated with. Admins choose which servers to federated with. Users can choose not to view content from certain servers. Mods choose which server their communities are hosted on and also can choose to ban users. Users choose communities.
Yup. It’s all one big mess. But any system with humans making choices is always going to be a mess.
We’ve tried the corporate model with algorithmic control over everything. It was a failure. So let’s get messy!
Of course, if the bots do end up more convincingly human than humans can ever be, who am I to say they don’t deserve a larger cut of our power?
I’m a fan of Phillip K Dick’s work. Also Robocop. What’s the difference between a human mind and an algorithm? Turing was wrong about it being intelligence, because humans are dumb as fuck. It’s empathy. That’s the difference.
The corporations didn’t just take away Alex Murphy’s humanity, they were taking away everyone’s humanity. Very few people in Robocop have any empathy for anyone else.
Why would you flip over a tortoise in a desert? You wouldn’t. Because you’re a human and you have empathy.
The only way an AI would be indistinguishable from a human is if it had empathy. But if the AI has empathy, it would be on our side, not on the side of an evil corporation.
Anyway I’m tired, not sure if this makes sense.
Good night!
I think that makes a lot of sense and it’s exactly the kind of stuff we should be considering at this stage. I also agree that humans are the ideal source of empathy and the best way to get around systems of secret code words and other methods that are used to circumvent algorithmic control.
But I also think AI-generated algorithms have their place. By design, content moderation is an unpaid task. Many volunteers are very good at moderation, but the work takes up a lot of their time and some of the best minds may decide to step away from moderation if it becomes to burdensome. On reddit, I saw a lot of examples of moderators who, as flawed humans, made choices that were not empathetic, but rather driven by a desire for power and control. Of course, if we make mistakes during the algorithm training process and allow our AI to be trained on the lowest common denominator of moderators, the algorithm may end up being just as power hungry - or even worse, considering that bots do not ever tire or log off.
But I do think there are ways to get past that, if we’re careful about how we implement such systems. While depending on your definition, bots may not be capable of empathy, based on some conversations with AI chatbots, I think AI can be trained to very closely simulate empathy. But as you mentioned about secret messages, bots will likely always be behind the curve when it comes to recognizing dog whistles and otherwise obfuscated hate speech. But as long as we always have dedicated empathetic humans taking part, the AI should be able to catch up quickly whenever a new pattern emerges. We may even be able to tackle these issues by sending our own bots into enemy territory and learning the dog whistles as they’re being developed, though there could be negative side effects to this strategy as well.
I think my primary concern when pushing for these kinds of algorithms is to make sure we don’t overburden moderation teams. I’ve worked too long in jobs where too much was expected for too little pay, and all the best and brightest left for greener pastures. I think the best way to make moderation rewarding is to automate the most obvious choices. If someone is blasting hate speech, a bot can be very certain that the comment should be hidden and a moderator can review the bot’s decision at a later time if they wish. I just want to get the most boring repetitive tasks off of moderators’ plates so they can focus on decisions that actually require nuance.
Something I really like about what you said was the idea of promoting choice. I was on a different social media platform lately, one which has a significant userbase of minors and therefore needs fast over-tuned moderation to limit liabilities (Campfire, the communication tool for Pokémon Go). I was chatting with a friend and a comment I thought was mundane got automatically blocked because it contained the word “trash.” Now, I think this indicates they are using a low quality AI, because context clues would have shown a better AI that the comment was fine. In any case, I was immediately frustrated because I thought my friend would get the impression that I said something really bad, because my comment was blocked. Except I soon found out that you can choose to see hidden comments by clicking on them. Without the choice of seeing the comment, I felt hate towards the algorithm. But when presented with the choice of seeing censored comments, my opinion immediately flipped and I actually appreciated the algorithm because it provides a safe platform where distasteful comments are immediately blocked so the young and impressionable can’t see them, but adults are able to remove the block to see the comments if they desire.
I think we can take this a step further and have automatically blocked comments show categories of reasons why they were blocked. For example, I might never want to click on comments that were blocked due to containing racial slurs. But when I see comments blocked because of spoilers, maybe I do want to take a peek at select comments. And maybe for general curse words, I want to remove the filter entirely so that on my device, those comments are never hidden from me in the first place. This would allow for some curating of the user experience before moderators even have a chance to arrive on the scene.
On the whole, I agree with you that humans are the ideal. But I am fearful of a future where bots are so advanced, we have no way to tell what is a human account and what is not. Whether we like it or not, moderators may eventually be bots - not because the system is designed that way but because many accounts will be bots and admins picking their moderation staff won’t be able to reliably tell the difference.
The most worrisome aspect of this future, in my mind, will be the idea of voting. A message may be hidden because of identified hate speech, and we may eventually have an option for users to vote whether the comment was correctly hidden or if the block should be removed. But if a majority of users are bots, a bad actor could have their bot swarm vote on removing blocks from comments that were correctly hidden due to containing hate speech. Whether it happens at the user level or at the moderator level, this is a risk. So, in my mind, one of the most important tasks we will need AI to perform is identifying other AI. At first, humans will be able to identify AI by the way they talk. But chatbots will become so realistic that eventually, we will need to rely on clues that humans are bad at detecting, such as when a swarm of bots perform similar actions in tandem, coordinating in a way that humans do not.
And I think it’s important we start this work now, because if the bots controlled by the opposition get good enough before we are able to reliably detect them, our detection abilities will always be behind the curve. In a worst case scenario, we would have a bot that thinks the most realistic swarms of bots are all human and the most fake-sounding groups of humans are all bots. This is the future I’m most concerned about heading off to make sure it doesn’t happen. I know the scenario is not palatable, and at this stage it may feel better to avoid AI entirely, but I think bots taking over this platform is a very real possibility and we should do our best to prevent it.
Just create an account with an instance that federates with both.
Any recommendations for an instance that’s unlikely to get defederated in the future?
That would be pretty hard to predict, but you can easily pick an instance that’s on both beehaw and lemmy.world
I was under the impression that when Beehaw chose to defederate, it only broke the community link. I thought that someone on lemmy.world could still see the local cached versions of posts, and could even continue posting content. However, only lemmy.world users would see the new comments as the local cache isn’t pushed back to the Beehaw post.
What I’m still unclear on is if sh.itjust.works users could see lemmy.world posts to a cached Beehaw post. My guess is no, right? If Beehaw was still federated, the Lemmy.world user post would be synced to the Beehaw post, and then this would be synced to the sh.itjust.works local cache. Is there a mesh feature to Lemmy? Where the local cache of sh.itjust.works will sync comments from the local cache of lemmy.world comments to a beehaw post?
Nice. Its been just 2 days for me using lemmy and im already banned for no reason in an entire server that i do not use just because im in another server. I whana say reddit moment but im getting mixed info into their reasoning. Some say its because they cant mod that much people and just defederated temporarilly while they fix stuff and others say their a radical echochamber that doesnt tolerate any slight deviants. So i dont know what to believe. If any of ya m8s could enligthen me some more that’l be sweet. Thank you.
Most normal users won’t care about any of this because it’ll shake itself out quickly as has happened with Mastodon. But if you do care, join up with a smaller server that plays nice with everybody and enjoy the whole fediverse.
this, then :
Selfhosting
Last I checked, their reason for defederating is to avoid the high influx of new wildcard users from large instances without vetting processes.
As for the radical echo chamber part, I can’t say for sure because I didn’t actually interact with them but I recall the term they make you agree to apply for an account was somewhat vague, possibly allowing arbitrary bans to enforce an echo chamber.
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Im sorry m8, i dont whana be an ass but… i dont understeand what you are trying to say in this part:" Until users are happy at 1984 instance (beehaw is even worst) that’s okay," what did you mean?
Q
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Being able to create spaces according to your needs without having your hand forced by anyone is kind of the point of the Fediverse. Beehaw can cultivate a community that fits what they want, just like Lemmy.world. That’s what it’s for.
There’s nothing stopping you from registering on Beehaw if you want to post there and contribute to that community. But without being able to detach themselves from instances that have open registration, there’s no way to even slow trolls down. Banning would be meaningless, because you can register as many accounts as you could want.
The point of the Fediverse is decentralization and choice where the default options have been a bland toxic mess.
Personally, I enjoy both the more cultivated environment of Beehaw and the bigger community feeling of Lemmy.world, so I registered with both Beehaw and Lemmy.blahaj.zone so that i can post and read whatever.
It’s not about what’s better, it’s about choice.
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Well then you better block this one too, because Lemmy.world defederated from the tanky instances. In fact, most instances did.
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Yeah, before all the new Reddit refugees the biggest instance was Lemmygrad, which was run and used exclusively by tankies. It gave Lemmy a bad wrap unfortunately.
Obviously with all the new users that’s changed, with instances like Lemmy.World quickly surpassing it. Now I’m not even sure if Lemmygrad is in the top 5. But my point is that most big instances have defederated from Lemmygrad, lemmy.world included.
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I disagree with this. A more nuanced take is that you should consider any beehaw communities read only unless refederation happens. The defederation was not out of ill will, it was about self preservation in a growing ecosystem and the reasons were clearly communicated and a path to refederation was left open. Read only posts are still valuable, and even though there is a more complex mechanism at play than true “read only” understanding that you can view is better than just blocking them in reverse. We are all friends here, and I think in the long run refederation will happen as this platform matures.
I’m basically a read only user anyway so hah!
I’m starting to realize that maybe I should learn to lurk. If I lurked in reddit I would have had a better experience.
Lurking with occasional comments in areas that interest you is best, I find. Oh and ignoring anyone who comes off as a troll or clown
Ignoring anything so controversial that people are at each other’s throats also helps. Although a healthy bit of disagreement is always fine.
Yep I’m all for some healthy back and forth, but once people start frothing at the mouth, I’m out
Yeah I would agree with this. It’s good to know for anyone new coming in but should be taken in good faith unless and until a reason crops up to change that. Not seen anything like that so far.
It would be nice if Lemmy let you know if you were browsing a thread from a defederated instance. Like a flair in the title or something, So you can read but you know your comment will only be seen by users on your instance.
Okay, guess I just won’t use it then if they defed from my primary instance. Glad they did this now and not later when they became bigger and more important.
If they’re that into making a safe space then fine. Hopefully some other people will also make more free spaces and both of them can exist and everyone can be happy.
I realize that is a highly optimistic outlook to put it mildly. I must remain hopeful to avoid losing my mind, if I haven’t already -.-
shrugs It sounds like they’d happily refederate once the right mod tools are available.
Seems like a pretty reasonable request. Hopefully they get the tools they’re after and then everyone can be even more connected again!
I’m sure there will be tons of volunteers for that, after instance admins make the user experience a horrible mess.
I can’t wait to create 2 more accounts to do the same thing I did with the one I already have.
